- Your computer is nothing without the motherboard.
It carries both power and data
between every critical system component,
be it a CPU, SSD, or lowly keyboard.
If it was a system of the body,
it would be kind of like your circulatory system
and your nervous system combined.
Everything plugs into it.
Thankfully, we've got standards
that tell us exactly what goes where, which,
wait, what are these?
And whoa, what is this?
Why does the CPU go in the back of this one?
Can this really be legal?
Only if it's legal to have fun.
So for fun today,
we're going to show you guys some wacky standard-breaking
motherboards and tell you why on earth
they should even exist in the first place.
Speaking of existing, Ridge Wallet does do that.
Ridge Wallet has redefined the traditional wallet
with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates.
Keep your wallet bulge down and use offer code Linus
to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping.
(excited music)
Let's kick things off with the Portwell PEB-9783G2AR.
It's a relatively unassuming little board,
standard microATX,
CPU socket, memory slots,
pretty much where they're supposed to be.
This one's a little bit off kilter, but then bam,
look at the rear I/O,
20 USB ports, of which six of them
are rated for 10 gigabit operation.
That is a ridiculous amount of USB expansion.
So much, that I can't even conceive of a legitimate
desktop use case for it, which is probably for the best,
since you won't be powering this motherboard
off of a normal desktop power supply, either.
It uses this pair of screw on power terminals.
And I have no idea where I'd get
a power adapter for this thing.
It did not come with one.
But, ignoring that, we've got three display outputs
along with dual gigabit ethernet,
meaning this is one hefty boy in terms of I/O.
I mean, you think you'd need a beefy CPU
like a Threadripper with tons of PCI express lanes
to power this thing.
But in fact, you do not.
It uses Xeon-branded 10th Gen Core CPUs
that do get a few extra enterprise features,
but none of those involve additional I/O,
it's just the same four lane DMI 3.0 link
between the chipset here and the CPU,
just like you'd have on a regular desktop board.
So, some back of the napkin math here seems to suggest that
the total rated theoretical throughput of all these
USB ports would be nearly five times greater
than the bandwidth available between the CPU and chipset.
So, uh, good luck with that.
To be fair to Portwell here though,
this thing is not intended for balls to the wall
transfer speeds at all times,
and that's reflected in how these USB ports are connected
to the system with a mixture
of chipset connected ports and ports
connected to ASMedia controllers,
you can actually see these three right here.
That means that no one controller is going to be
totally overwhelmed by high-speed I/O.
And it means that you can strategically connect
high speed devices and lower speed devices,
depending on your needs.
According to Portwell,
this type of board is intended for things like
autonomous vehicles, industrial automation,
manufacturing robots, and things like that.
So, lots of cameras
and lots of low bandwidth I/O
for controlling servos, and what have you.
That use case is exemplified not only by
how many USB ports the board has,
but by other things like how many serial ports.
It's got two, which can be switched
between RS422 and 45 modes.
And also, this crazy PCI Express 16x connector,
that's at a 90 degree angle
and then also rotated 180 degrees.
Meaning that this board is designed for some
seriously weird chassis layouts.
A lot of support components are actually
on the rear of the board, as well.
And there are even eight
general purpose I/O pins here, somewhere.
Those are very useful for controlling simple electronics.
Although I couldn't tell you where they are since they're
unlabeled and there's no manual available, but that's okay.
You don't need a manual to figure out how to wear a dad hat.
The hardest part is picking the right color and design
so you can get your dad to help.
- Wow, a dad hat, thanks, Linus.
Portwell's great, but we've got more
in our batch of weird boards.
And one of the more well-known ones
is the Enctec Rev Q270 Surnia here,
which is a relatively normal looking motherboard.
You've got your display outputs,
your type C, your dual gigabit ethernet,
actually pretty impressive rear I/O.
But then you look at the front and,
like, what, this thing has no CPU socket.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe the CPU
is soldered on because there's more to this story.
Because even the chipset is missing here.
It's when we flip around
that we see what's really going on here.
The CPU socket and the chipset are just chilling back here,
like it's no big deal, but, uh, yeah, big deal.
How the heck are you supposed to put this thing
in a regular case without all kinds of headaches
mounting your cooler?
As it turns out, this design is specifically made
to remove headaches
that other cooling arrangements can create.
Think about it, you've got your PC controlling
the CNC mill or other connected mega tool.
And there are shards of sawdust, fiberglass, metal,
you name it, flying all around the room.
That stuff's a recipe for a very bad time,
if it gets ingested by typical air intake fans.
So if you still want to be able to access your I/O,
your choices are to use cable extensions
or relocate your cooling to the other side of the PCB.
It's the same story if you're dealing with extremely
temperature sensitive work equipment,
or maybe you're near a forge where the intake
would be inundated with extremely hot air.
Ha, gosh dang forge.
This way you can more easily duct the cooling
and potentially operate entirely passively.
Oh, and one neat little feature is this AT mode jumper.
It's not in the manual,
but what it does is makes it so the PC stays on
as long as the power button is active.
So you can have a hard switch,
like you'd see on a power supply with on or off.
Again, more of an industrial thing,
but chunky switches are super satisfying, so I like it.
- Okay, that is a niche use case.
Well, how about something that you
might've actually seen before without realizing it?
This bad boy right here
is the Shenzen Zeal-All ZA-SK1050.
And it has both a regular CPU socket and
a G-Force GTX 1050 Ti built into it.
Why?
Well, it's actually built as a TV motherboard,
which seems like a poorly translated way
of saying digital signage.
And that seems about right.
Not only do we have that 1050 Ti,
which is much more capable of 3D acceleration
than Intel onboard graphics,
but there are twin LVDS headers on the motherboard,
both capable of driving a 1080p display.
And in fact, the I/O on this thing is spread around
in a very unusual way.
Both the left and right edges of the board are absolutely
brimming with ports.
So if we assume that the CPU is on top,
then on the right, we've got a 19 volt power connector,
HDMI, gigabit ethernet, USB 3.0, SATA, and audio.
But wait a second.
These are some of these are internal connectors.
What's up with SATA and what's this little weird
SATA-labeled block next to it?
Ah, yes, these are cool, right?
These SATA power connectors are common on a lot of
embedded motherboards because they take external power.
That means that, kind of like the ATX 12 volt only standard
that Intel has been pushing,
this motherboard is responsible
for handling all peripheral power,
usually using an adapter that plugs in as a single block
into the back of your drive, like this one.
Around the other side,
we've got what looks like an HDMI port,
but is actually an LPC Bus port for debugging.
I'm not entirely sure how you'd use it,
but it's nice that it's there.
And then next to that are SATA power and data ports,
those LVDS connectors, a USB 3.0 front panel connector,
a backlight invertor connector,
and a single USB 2.0 header.
To say that this is non-standard
would be like saying Linus drops things sometimes.
Wait, wait a minute,
was this written with Alex in mind?
Okay, you know what, whatever, it's just seriously weird.
Presumably, the idea is that this would mount
to a box in the back of the digital sign,
and then break out into all the
connectors that it needs from there.
And the 1050 Ti is in there to make sure
that it's got enough power to drive whatever animations
that you're going to run on the displays.
Aside from that,
there's not much else going on with this,
other than the distinct lack of expansion slots,
other than an M.2 SATA 2240 port
and an M.2 2220 slot that's marked for WiFi.
RAM is handled by DDR4 SODIMMs,
and you thankfully get two slots stacked
on top of each other to play with,
similar to how a thicker laptop might keep a low profile.
- [Brandon] Boring!
- Okay, fair enough, enough with the industrial boards.
Let's talk about something a little bit more practical,
this little number from PCWINMAX.
Well, it's pretty normal looking right out of the gate here.
You've got a PCI Express 16x slot, a 1X slot,
two DDR3 RAM slots, SATA ports,
a really poorly placed USB 3.0 header,
and even fairly normal rear I/O.
PS2, HDMI, VGA, four USB ports, and gigabit ethernet.
Wait, are you sure this is a weird board?
I mean, have you guys noticed what makes it weird yet?
Ah, yes.
It's the socket, what is that?
That is PGA-989,
and what uses it is mobile
second and third Gen Intel Core series CPUs.
Yep, we're looking at a desktop board that was made
for mobile CPUs that first launched back in 2011.
So you might look at this and say, well,
that's gotta be some kind of ancient relic of the past,
but if this date code on it is anything to go by,
it was actually manufactured on Christmas Day in 2018.
What gives, well, remember back at Computex 2019,
when we started seeing new x79 motherboards
for Ivy Bridge-y high-end desktop CPUs?
This just so happens to coincide with that.
And my best guess is that these components were being
recycled at around that time and found their way
over to China where still-good components were repurposed
to become low-cost options for PC builds.
It makes sense.
I mean, you might've thrown out that old laptop
with a busted screen,
and a battery that looks like it ate too much at the buffet,
but the components on the main board
were probably still totally fine.
And we saw something very similar recently, actually,
with Haswell mobile CPUs being transplanted
into desktop CPU form factors.
This kind of upcycling, honestly, is kind of awesome.
And I wish that it happened more often.
Unfortunately finding a CPU to match a board like this
is a little tough.
By third gen, most CPUs were being soldered
directly to the motherboard,
using ball grid arrays, rather than pin grid array sockets.
And the only one that I know for sure uses pins,
is the Core i7 3920XM,
which goes for around 130 to $150 on eBay.
Worth it?
Considering that I'm not even sure
they're selling these boards anymore,
probably not, but why don't we take a look
at what was in the other PCWINMAX box.
Okay, this is a really weird board.
It says it's ITX, but it's clearly much smaller than that.
I mean, I can hold it in one hand.
The model number says EPIC-M37,
which really doesn't help any,
you certainly won't be installing
an epic server CPU on this thing.
So from what I can tell,
it's a similar concept to the other PCWINMAX motherboard,
but a little more integrated,
because you can see, if we flip it around,
ah, yes, our CPU is now soldered.
And then we've got an additional chipset on here that,
according to the marking, seems to suggest it is an HM65.
So this is an earlier Sandy Bridge era board
with a single DDR3 SODIMM on the front
and two mini-PCIE slots.
One of those is probably SATA-only,
given that the age of this chipset means
you wouldn't be able to boot from an NVMe drive,
even if you had a compatible SSD.
Oh, yeah, speaking of chipsets,
get subscribed because we're going
to find out once and for all,
if you really get more performance
out of a high-end chipset motherboard.
I/O on this puppy is pretty limited, just four USB ports,
gigabit, ethernet, VGA, and HDMI.
Input power is actually kind of an unknown here.
It just says DC jack one.
So just start trying things starting with 12 volt,
and hope you don't fry it.
I mean, it can't require that much juice,
all it's got on it is CPU, one stick of RAM,
maybe a couple of mini-PCIE devices, ethernet, and USB.
Okay, technically there's SATA power on here as well,
but that kind of goes against the spirit of building
with something this tiny.
Surely, you're not going to put a big old hard drive in it.
This one is so tiny that there's not much else
to say about it.
The one additional feature
that would make it interesting is a serial port,
and unfortunately there isn't one on here,
so it's really just a tiny PC,
and your guess is as good as mine as to how exactly
the cooler is supposed to mount to it.
There's no mounting points for one,
not even for the chipset.
Maybe whatever CPU this is doesn't need one?
Yeah, no, that's definitely, that's definitely not right.
This was but a small taste of what's out there, guys.
We had at least three more
that we wanted to get in for this video,
that just never arrived, like this x79 motherboard
with only two RAM slots.
So let us know of some of the weirder motherboards
that you've seen, and maybe we'll circle back
and take another shot at this,
because there is no shortage of them out there.
Just like there's no shortage of segues
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Thanks for watching, guys.
If you enjoyed this look at some weird-ass motherboards,
maybe go check out our previous video
looking at some weird-ass GPUs.
They were, they were, they were very weird.